There were some interesting thoughts from Professor Diana Laurillard at the UALL conference in April this year.  She noted that MOOCS usually had a completion rate of 10% or less and that the dominant users were people who had degrees already (70% in the case of Edinburgh, 85% in the case of Coursera).  As she said, ‘the main users of MOOCS are highly qualified professionals – MOOCS are parasitic on university teaching paid for by undergraduates’. This all suggests to me that the OU’s ‘FutureLearn’ is not a game changer, but a diversion of the OU’s main business of giving...

The news that the Government’s loan scheme is now likely to be as expensive than the system it replaced due to the amount of student debt that is now unlikely to be repaid, probably won’t surprise many people. But the response that this may mean a reduction in teaching budgets and so a reduction in support to students, will be the wrong response.  Such a reduction is likely to increase levels of student dropout with a consequent increase in unrepayable debt and the entry into what bankers’ apparently call a ‘death spiral’. It’s not difficult to show that investing in...

News that the OU is to close one of its regional centres and review the existence of most of the others, may be more than a straw in the wind.  A similar review was carried out a few years ago, but came to the conclusion that at that time it was too expensive to close them. This time may be different – the appointment of a man from Microsoft as the OU’s VC was always likely to be a sign that the OU was going to move to entirely online provision.  After the abolition of the OU’s regional network will...

Private Eye recently featured the Open University’s Vice Chancellor Martin Bean’s advert for a ‘speechwriter’ for a salary of £45,000 (Eye 1361). It set me wondering if the money would not be better spent on someone to look into why the OU’s graduation rate has fallen from 57% in the mid-seventies to around 22% more recently. But then a Vice Chancellor on £407,000 obviously has a lot of things on his plate apart from his students…

I wrote the letter below to the Times Higher education a couple of weeks ago but it didn’t get published. More about MOOCS “Professor Laurillard’s comments (THE 16th January) about MOOCs that the ‘simplistic models of MOOCS are not the answer’ to solving the problem of mass higher education was a welcome antidote to some of the hype that surrounds this topic. “The problem for me is that the term e-learning is often a ‘category error’.  What institutions are doing is ‘e-teaching’: ‘e-learning’ is what students are doing (or, as I will allege, often not doing very successfully).  The distinction is important because using the term e-learning encourages institutions...

My latest article in Open Learning is just out – ‘Distance education: are we failing our students?’ The first 50 copies are available free from http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KnbX9b4nynHwkPxtztv8/full Abstract This paper brings together some data on student retention in distance education in the form of graduation rates at a sample of distance institutions. It suggests that there is a ‘distance education deficit’ with many distance institutions having less than a quarter of the graduation rates of conventional institutions. It looks in some detail at the data for one well-known institution – the UK Open University – and surveys some of the reasons...

Well another EDEN conference has been and come and gone and is lauded as a great success on its website.  But as usual it seemed to be all about new technostuff for even more glitzy teaching and, as usual, there didn’t seem to be a mention of the poor students on the receiving end of all this stuff or how most of them seem to be failing – victims of the ‘distance education deficit’. Indeed it feels that distance educators at conferences seem to spend most of their time talking to each other about how wonderful the distance world is and...

I’ve been a UK Open University Associate Lecturer (AL or ‘Adjunct faculty’ for US readers) for nearly 40 years on and off, so I’m daily expecting that letter from the nice people at Human Resources suggesting that I really ought to go – now. But before I go I see that retention is – again- on the university’s agenda.  It certainly should be – we now have new students coming in who will be taking out substantial loans to study, but with an 80% chance of never graduating – so never collecting any financial benefit from having a degree (the OU’s graduation...

Is your institution a ‘Darwinista’  ‘Fatalista’ or ‘Retentioneering’ institution? Rate it using the questionnaire under ‘Support for tutors and students’ – ‘Test Yourself (and your institution)!’ on this website.  

‘E-learning’ or ‘E-teaching’? I don’t know who invented the term ‘E-learning’ but it was both a streak of genius and a ‘category error’ (a phrase due to the philosopher Gilbert Ryle).  A category error is a semantic or ontological error in which “things of one kind are presented as if they belonged to another”.  In this case the error is to confuse the intention with the result.  E-learning is what we hope students will do; ‘e-teaching’ is what distance institutions do to try to get that result. This error is important because it allows for discussion about e-learning which concentrates on what institutions...